Grammatical error correction using hybrid systems and type filtering

This paper describes our submission to the CoNLL 2014 shared task on grammatical error correction using a hybrid approach, which includes both a rule-based and an SMT system augmented by a large webbased language model. Furthermore, we demonstrate that correction type estimation can be used to remove unnecessary corrections, improving precision without harming recall. Our best hybrid system achieves state of-the-art results, ranking first on the original test set and second on the test set with alternative annotations.[We would like to thank] Cambridge English Language Assessment, a division of Cambridge Assessment, for supporting this research

Sparse Coding of Neural Word Embeddings for Multilingual Sequence Labeling

In this paper we propose and carefully evaluate a sequence labeling framework which solely utilizes sparse indicator features derived from dense distributed word representations. The proposed model obtains (near) state-of-the art performance for both part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition for a variety of languages. Our model relies only on a few thousand sparse coding-derived features, without applying any modification of the word representations employed for the different tasks. The proposed model has favorable generalization properties as it retains over 89.8% of its average POS tagging accuracy when trained at 1.2% of the total available training data, i.e.~150 sentences per language

JFLEG: A Fluency Corpus and Benchmark for Grammatical Error Correction

We present a new parallel corpus, JHU FLuency-Extended GUG corpus (JFLEG) for developing and evaluating grammatical error correction (GEC). Unlike other corpora, it represents a broad range of language proficiency levels and uses holistic fluency edits to not only correct grammatical errors but also make the original text more native sounding. We describe the types of corrections made and benchmark four leading GEC systems on this corpus, identifying specific areas in which they do well and how they can improve. JFLEG fulfills the need for a new gold standard to properly assess the current state of GEC.Comment: To appear in EACL 2017 (short papers

Establishing a New State-of-the-Art for French Named Entity Recognition

The French TreeBank developed at the University Paris 7 is the main source of morphosyntactic and syntactic annotations for French. However, it does not include explicit information related to named entities, which are among the most useful information for several natural language processing tasks and applications. Moreover, no large-scale French corpus with named entity annotations contain referential information, which complement the type and the span of each mention with an indication of the entity it refers to. We have manually annotated the French TreeBank with such information, after an automatic pre-annotation step. We sketch the underlying annotation guidelines and we provide a few figures about the resulting annotations

CamemBERT: a Tasty French Language Model

Pretrained language models are now ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing. Despite their success, most available models have either been trained on English data or on the concatenation of data in multiple languages. This makes practical use of such models --in all languages except English-- very limited. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of training monolingual Transformer-based language models for other languages, taking French as an example and evaluating our language models on part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition and natural language inference tasks. We show that the use of web crawled data is preferable to the use of Wikipedia data. More surprisingly, we show that a relatively small web crawled dataset (4GB) leads to results that are as good as those obtained using larger datasets (130+GB). Our best performing model CamemBERT reaches or improves the state of the art in all four downstream tasks.Comment: ACL 2020 long paper. Web site: https://camembert-model.f

A Full Non-Monotonic Transition System for Unrestricted Non-Projective Parsing

Restricted non-monotonicity has been shown beneficial for the projective arc-eager dependency parser in previous research, as posterior decisions can repair mistakes made in previous states due to the lack of information. In this paper, we propose a novel, fully non-monotonic transition system based on the non-projective Covington algorithm. As a non-monotonic system requires exploration of erroneous actions during the training process, we develop several non-monotonic variants of the recently defined dynamic oracle for the Covington parser, based on tight approximations of the loss. Experiments on datasets from the CoNLL-X and CoNLL-XI shared tasks show that a non-monotonic dynamic oracle outperforms the monotonic version in the majority of languages.Comment: 11 pages. Accepted for publication at ACL 201